Cont: Trans Women are not Women II: The Bath Of Khan

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Because that was what was being asked for, an experiment that could be performed to demonstrate the existence of someone's gender identity that could not equally be said to demonstrate the existence of someone's soul.







Darat proposed the experiment "you ask people" so I asked whether he then thereby agreed that the existence of someone's soul could be determined by the same experiment. He simply stated "Funny" in response, and since I have no interest in playing these games I decided to take that as a yes.
Even funnier.
 
Can someone suggest a method for me to determine my own gender identity?
 
Can someone suggest a method for me to determine my own gender identity?

Be careful... you wouldn't want to assume your own gender. That would make you a bigot against yourself.
 
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I know you're being unserious, but we actually already have such a code. Most societies do. And while it's way more sophisticated than the simple hanky code, it's been around so long, and accreted semantics so gradually, that most of us have little difficulty interpreting it. Some people do, though. And others like to mess with it, the way a poet might mess with grammar or syntax. Which is the right way to think about it, really. A code this complex is really a language, with degrees of ambiguity and flexibility of meaning that codes really can't manage or produce.


Well, that's kind of my point. Most of the symbols of that language are stereotyped by gender; that is to say, their meanings are contingent on a perceived gender context. Sure it can all be redesigned (or as a better metaphor, re-evolved after the hypothetical mass extinction event of nullifying all gender behavior expectations) but it's a big project and there's a lot of inertia in the system.
 
What I find fascinating here is that the example provided has a very obvious purpose. Someone needs to stand up to bullies, may as well make that a masculine virtue. Not all masculinity is toxic; sometimes a lack of risk aversion may be socially beneficial.
Oh yeah I agree that standing up to bullies can solve the problem more often than not, that wasn't really my point.
My point in my example was that it becomes a problem when the bullied person takes the gendered phrase literally, they can start to measure themselves against that gender role and find themselves feeling as if they don't fit.
Why make it a masculine virtue, wouldn't it be better to just make it a virtue?
 
Oh yeah I agree that standing up to bullies can solve the problem more often than not, that wasn't really my point.
My point in my example was that it becomes a problem when the bullied person takes the gendered phrase literally, they can start to measure themselves against that gender role and find themselves feeling as if they don't fit.
Why make it a masculine virtue, wouldn't it be better to just make it a virtue?

Well, there's the biological differences, which means that on average a man is going to have more size, mass, and strength with which to resist and drive off a bully. So that role of physical protector is going to end up being a male role, and the virtues of that role are going to be seen as masculine virtues. Not that women can't be big and strong, or small and strong, or small and fierce, etc. But we're talking about social norms and expectations evolving organically over (tens of) thousands of years, in feedback loops with biological differences on average.

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But whatever. How about a much more modern gender role, p0lka? How do you feel about gender roles like "professional women's basketball player" or "women's world cup soccer forward"?
 
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Go to your local department store and see which sorts of clothes make you happy.

https://twitter.com/BlueBallSkeptic/status/632587889960841217

By that logic cross-dressers (ie those who like to wear clothes typically associated with the other sex yet who don't identify as transgender) don't exist. ETA: and it appears cross-dressers outnumber transgenders by about an order of magnitude, so your proposal doesn't even work in a statistical sense.
 
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Why make it a masculine virtue, wouldn't it be better to just make it a virtue?

Depends on whether you believe young men and young women are equally inclined towards and competent at the art of interpersonal violence.
 
...it appears cross-dressers outnumber transgenders by about an order of magnitude, so your proposal doesn't even work in a statistical sense.

Okay, so I wasn't being entirely serious, but now I'm interested.

Are you including those who cross-dress only occasionally, rather than trying to present an opposite-sexed gender expression on a daily basis? I'd be surprised if consistent cross-dressers exist in significant numbers compared to those who identify as trans every day.
 
Okay, so I wasn't being entirely serious, but now I'm interested.

Are you including those who cross-dress only occasionally, rather than trying to present an opposite-sexed gender expression on a daily basis? I'd be surprised if consistent cross-dressers exist in significant numbers compared to those who identify as trans every day.

I was going off this (pdf)
PREVALENCE:
As mentioned above, it is very difficult to estimate the prevalence of cross-dressing in western society, with many cross-dressing women publicly invisible through societal acceptance and many cross-dressing men publicly invisible through being socially unaccepted and therefore forced behind closed doors. However one well-respected paper broaching the subject of the prevalence of transsexualism, has suggested that in the United States, conservative estimates of the number of cross-dressing males indicate a prevalence of between two and five percent of all adult males
 
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